Funeral

Two Italian designers, Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel, have put forth a green alternative to cemeteries, funerals and burials – even cremation. The Capsula Mundi concept uses an egg-shaped burial pod of biodegradable starch plastic as the coffin where the body is placed in a fetal position.

The Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church of Greece on Thursday repeated its refusal to sanction the practice of cremation, in an announcement issued on Thursday.

“The Holy Synod refuses [to accept] that it is dignified for the deceased to be burned in a furnace,” it said after a meeting chaired by Archbishop of Athens and All Greece Ieronymos.

Friends and family of great Greek actor Minas Hatzisavvas gathered at the 1st Cemetery of Athens to pay their last respects to a talented man. He expressed the wish for a state funeral, followed by a cremation to take place in Bulgaria due the fact that there are no cremation facilities in Greece.

Great Greek actor Minas Hatzisavvas will receive a state funeral at the first cemetery of Athens at noon on Wednesday. His family have expressed the desire for money to be gathered for refugees instead of wreaths.

Actor Yorgos Kotanidis, a friend and colleague, of the actor that passed away on Monday posted on Facebook:

Cemeteries in Greece are overcrowded and have nowhere to expand . For this reason bodies are often kept underground for three years before being exhumed so that bones can be stored at an ossuary.

Families have the option of leasing for another three years, but the costs are prohibitive. Most people choose to exhume the graves.

Modest funeral plots multiply at the back of an old cemetery at Lesbos (Mytilene). Dirt mounds at the back are a foil for the imposing, marble tombs that dot Saint Panteleimon’s grounds as the graves of refugees that died reaching the island continue to multiply.

A horrific account of someone buried …alive or a viral Internet hoax from Honduras, of all places?
You decide.
Regardless, wouldn’t an autopsy by a couple of internationally known coroners flown to the central American country solve this question?

A Belgrade man was unable to bury his mother-in-law because she was, due to negligence, carelessness or some other reason, cremated by mistake.

The body of the deceased, 80-year-old Ljubica Popovic, was switched at the funeral home with that of another woman of the same name, who was to be cremated.

An imprisoned man has endured two days of Kafkaesque adversity to attend the funeral of his father at an Alevi worshipping house in the western province of Bal?kesir. The procedural struggle occurred because cemevis are not officially recognized in Turkish law as places of worship. 

Last week I was at the funeral of a dear friend. He was young, had a beautiful wife and two teenage sons, an extremely accomplished man, very successful and loved by all who knew him. He has a mother, sister, many close friends and colleagues. Apart from his family, hundreds of friends and acquaintances rushed to the funeral? shattered. Funeral wreaths flooded the church courtyard.